Change
by Quillinx
Summary: She wrote to him. Thought of her words floating around her dimension, paragraphs of nonsense that she thought he would have wanted to know, or maybe not- every day was like more newness overtaking the oldness, another layer of normal-abnormal life obscuring her. / Rose/Doctor, post-Doomsday up until Journey's End- snippets, musings, ambiguity, take from it what you will.


She wrote to him. Thought of her words floating around her dimension, paragraphs of nonsense that she thought he would have wanted to know, or maybe not- every day was like more newness overtaking the oldness, another layer of normal-abnormal life obscuring her memories of the Rose she used to be. With the Doctor she had been Rose; now she was Rose-without-the-Doctor, as if the absence of him changed her more than his presence had.

Today she set her pen on the paper and stared at the blankness, _my life without you._ The words wouldn't come. _Dear Doctor… Hello, Doctor… Doctor. _

She felt as if she didn't know either of them, Rose or the Doctor, and who was she to pretend that she could still have him in her life? He was gone. He had given her everything.

_i love you_

If she could only have been a little quicker, given him more time to say it.

_And I suppose... if it's my last chance to say it... Rose Tyler-_

It sounded as if he was saying her name for the last time.

If only- but no- there was nothing she could have done. She knew what he was going to have said. She knew. Did she know?

Still, she thought, gazing dully down at the single tear that splattered onto the paper, like the beginning of a storm. Still… she would have done anything to buy those extra few seconds, to know for sure, to live with that certainty, that the Doctor and Rose Tyler-

She was just a little too late, as always. As always.

She never gave up on him. After a while, she learned how to smile again, and after that she learned how to be useful again, throwing herself into her work because there was nothing else. Sometimes she imagined that he was looking down on her from some screen or other, or hovering over her shoulder, and it made her pause and then try harder.

Someday, she imagined, she would give up and tuck the memories of a blue police box back into some dusty corner of her mind, maybe get back into the game, start it up again with Mickey. Lead a normal life. Have kids. Live in a house. As if she was a drug addict; _I finally let go of my drug of choice, the Doctor… _

It never happened. And after a while, she gave up on the idea of giving up. Accepted that her life would be a messy, painful patchwork, accepted that what was done was done. Accepted that she only had one path in life to take- the only other life available to her- to find the Doctor again. For her happily-ever-after.

Somehow she never imagined that he would move on. Thinking back, the thought struck her as incredibly self-centered. As if she had ever been the only one for the Doctor. Even though he made her feel like the only girl on not-necessarily-Earth, in fact usually not Earth. She had thought things like that were made up by authors with romantic minds, the writers of pop songs- and then-

Could she even call this a love story? She didn't know what it had been, this thing between her and the Doctor, except that it had been uncertain and heartbreaking and wonderful and completely, absolutely magical.

Dangerous. Too dangerous, she thought sometimes, and then sometimes- not dangerous enough. _He _was dangerous. You couldn't try to fight danger with danger, and yet that was what she had been trying to do, expecting him to protect her, not realizing that she was part of the protection of the majority. She realized it now. The danger was part of why she missed him- truly being alive, now that was something she missed as well, and- oh, she missed too much.

Something you couldn't just live without. Not now. Not after…

A rose. Rose.

In my dreams I keep asking a girl where to find one, and she is dressed in the most extraordinarily immodest way.

She will not answer me, and she keeps walking away.

_she's my plus one_

I keep dreaming of a girl.

_i'm left travelling on my own cause there's no one else._

_there's me._

Girl in my dreams.

_i'm so glad I met you._

_me too. _

_the way her eyes glow with that light and the way_

I find myself wanting to draw a perfect rose, over and over although I cannot find a rose anywhere.

_we'll go down fighting, yeah?_

_her hair blows with the wind of a thousand worlds and_

I remember this girl I have drawn her although I know her well in my dream

I know her well I know.

I know her

_the way she just cares, so much, forgot about the_

_then what are you waiting for?_

_i could save the world but lose you_

She is my s-

_if you talk to rose… tell her i… oh, she knows._

She will not answer me, and she keeps walking away.

_i think you need a doctor_

_beauty of humanity forgot about the beauty of humanity and rose_

_shows me_

Sometimes she wondered if he thought of her.

"I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words; I scatter them in time and space… a message to lead myself here."

He hadn't meant to, didn't want to, never chose to, so, so sorry- never wanted to cause her pain, just the opposite in fact. That was always the way it was. He never learned from his mistakes. Didn't want to be alone, but he held on too tight.

It was worse for her, though, he imagined. He had Martha, and then Donna, and always the TARDIS- and after all, he was used to loss. He lived by loss. What had Rose ever lost in her life- A-levels- and he found himself getting angry and had to take a few deep breaths. The best way's to forget- he had learned that a thousand times over, and yet- he didn't want to forget, not this, not her- _so sorry I ever started this-_

It was over with her. She was gone, too far away for even him. Nobody- Time Lord, human, nobody- could break that barrier.

"One by one. They were just dying. Basically we've been building this, um, travel machine. This, uh, dimension cannon so I could, uh, so I— "

He wanted to grab her and kiss her into the next dimension. That had always been his problem, underoverestimating his companions, after all, and-

"I think I'm called... Rose Tyler. No. Yes, no. Sorry, no no. In this form, I'm called... Bad Wolf. Are you afraid of the big bad wolf, Doctor?"

- that had been rather an oversight.

"2005. Tell you what. I bet you're going to have a really great year."

It's not like she had figured they were going to- what, what, get married? Have _kids, _each with a heart and a half? Did Time Lords even _do _that, with humans? She was sure it was against the rules somewhere. Anyway, she would have been happy without kids, they could have adopted some even- maybe not brilliant like him, but they never would have been with her as a mother, anyway, she thought wistfully.

It wasn't like that. No, it was more than that.

He had been her first look at a new life. Her life- empty- it had _felt _meaningful, but in the end it was nothing, compared to him. She would have turned out like her worst nightmare; shallow, always on the phone or the telly, argumentative, indecisive, vain, selfish, overdramatic, generally useless to the public apart from being a miniscule consumer dot sendings money into circulation in the British economy, and _happy to be that way_- the list went on and on. To mean something to someone, and more importantly, to have somebody _really matter to her; _it had touched her heart.

Woken her up.

Their story was- _had been - _emotional, dramatic, just- something out of some television show, almost. _Aliens, _dammit! And it wasn't just the aliens, it was… the widening of her world. Showing her that her, her world, they weren't the only things out there. And once she had seen it, it was impossible not to care about it. Ah, although he had woken her up to so much, she had become aware of what really mattered too late. She had thought she would have her whole life to say it. Never thinking about the details of all the things that could go wrong with them. As a couple.

Perhaps it was selfish of her, but in the end, what she had felt the most was the pain of knowing they could never truly be _together _the way she had wanted.

It had never been the distance that had bothered her, really, since she never knew just how far away he would be at any given time. _That's the thing about having a time machine, Rose, _she told herself, a fraction fretfully. _He could be anywhere in time and space. Or he could possibly be ...dead. Oh, no, they do that regeneration thing, don't they… _All the same, the matter had always spoken of death to her- if nothing else, the death of a big part of who he had become. When her first had changed, it had felt like he had died. He had become some other person, who she would grow to love as well, but it was a bit- well, different. If she was to meet him, what if he was somebody else? Another Doctor? Would it really matter so much?

Yes and no. No and yes. Either way, this - him- _the Doctor- _hewas more important than anything else. She played her part well, after several failed attempts, it was true- but everybody played their own part in the timeline, she had learned that much from the Doctor. So she gave instructions to Donna Noble, the ginger with the attitude, and waited.

Their first meeting after their last parting didn't really go as planned. She still remembered the timeless moment in which she saw him and for a second there was a little, cruel relief- he's the same, still my Doctor, I can see it in his eyes- and she let her guard down, and then everything was crazy, crazy, crazy. Hardly a proper reunion, but, as she kept asking herself- _what had she been expecting? _He was the Doctor, and she realized that this was really what she had been missing all along…

She could deal with crazy, dammit, but not this, like he expects her to take some kind of replacement- not really a replacement, but a replacement all the same, a second Doctor and it was all so convenient and _he had the same eyes. _She loved him, because he was the Doctor, but it also hurt, because he was leaving her, even though he would stay with her, and right now she really didn't want to think about the complex decisions of _if he was really the Doctor of course he is but there can't be two of them the second one's got to be someone else except he's not _but of course she had to.

So she kissed him, because it was easier, and the kiss was more desperation than anything else. Just for a moment, she allowed herself to pretend that this wasn't what it was- _which would be snogging your significant other (for lack of a better word to put it because you and he never really made your relationship clear) your significant other's clone which also contains some of a temp from Chiswick right before aforementioned significant other goes and leaves you after you went to all that trouble to see him again- _and was instead what she wished it was. Because she figured that after the hard work she had put in she deserved an easy answer. _Does it need saying? _Of course it does, you prat, she wanted to say, but he said it all and he didn't say it and of course it didn't need saying because she had known all along, how could she not. And yet to hear it in words was like the closure she had needed for so long.

She held his hand and watched him fly away and knew Donna would take good care of him, knew he'd be all right in the end, land on his feet as always, but her heart broke anyway.

There was a lot to figure out. All of a sudden, her life's _goal _for the past huge chunk of her existence was accomplished and done and there was suddenly a lot more to figure _out._

It was a little anticlimactic, actually, walking away from the spot. She wasn't quite sure whether she would come to visit the spot again, like an anniversary place or a gravestone, dropping off flowers; or whether she would try and forget everything about what had happened, do her best to pretend that all her fairytales had come true with _her _Doctor. Who was not actually _her _Doctor anymore, but the universe's Doctor again. But, as compensation, she now actually had her own personal Doctor, a strange mixture of her first, her second, and the ginger with the attitude. She liked him. Not sure about love. She didn't know how she was supposed to feel about him.

_Binary binary binary binary binary_

He didn't try to hold her hand, and for that she was grateful. They walked together back to the house, and she said, "I really need to sleep."

She didn't, though. Sleep. She sat awake in bed and thought for a long time. How was she supposed to even _think _about him, for God's sake? Was he just supposed to slip into the slender-time-travelin'-man-shaped hole in her life, as if he had never left? Or was she supposed to see him as a whole different person? Was he a whole different person?

People, she thought, shouldn't exist in two places at the same time. It just confused the ones that _cared _about them, and getting it _right. _What was she supposed to _do? _All right, yeah, the kiss was probably out of line. Almost an accident. And the fact that she had never said a proper goodbye- that hurt too.

Cut off again, and it hurt, and it-

-always would. That's okay. We all live with our hurts, she thought, and if hers were more painful than most, there were many with more painful than hers. And suddenly she didn't feel like sleeping at all, so she got up off the bed. Went to find the Doctor- God, she'd really have to ask him what he'd like to be called, wouldn't she?- and she went into the kitchen and he was sitting at the table.

And she said, "Care for a cup of tea?"

"Your mum already made some," he said.

"We have a lot to talk about," she said, and he nodded, and just watched her carefully until she thought she might break under his gaze.

"Maybe now's not the time, yeah?" she said, and almost laughed, and brushed a strand of messy hair behind her ear. "Yeah." And didn't look at him, and then did, and his expression- not sure how to describe that expression, but it was very worried, like a puppy anxious of upsetting its master- it made her want to laugh and cry.

"Well, anyways, it's okay." she said.

They ...didn't have all the time in the world. But it was enough. She felt stability beginning to return to her life in a gradual rush of realization and had to sit down.

He took her hand across the table, and she didn't pull away. What she had before was gone, now- but that was alright- what was important was what she had now. Another chance, at love, at something, at the Doctor. And she slid her fingers up his wrist and felt the blood pumping beneath his skin in a quick, steady rhythm.

* * *

**So guys, I finally got round to writing a Doctor Who fic, and it's probably not all that surprising that it's a shippy angsty oneshot. Sorry for being predictable. /shot**

**Hope you enjoyed! Thought I did alright, seeing as I haven't seen past Series 1 with Rose (I sort of skipped around. Blame Rio.) but I Googled the rest. Ah, technology. If you see any errors or have any criticism on the writing itself, please leave a review! I know it's rough writing and parts of it are really rushed, but honestly I started the dang thing months ago and I just wanted to get it off my back xD**

**edit;; all right, so apparently I was a careless little bunny and didn't read the rules properly; /shot/ Song lyrics have been removed, thank you for informing me of that.**

**The image for the cover belongs to BBC, presumably.**


End file.
